The downloading of compromising images of celebrities had an interesting effect in New Zealand over the weekend when it brought down most of the country’s internet.
Spark New Zealand – the country’s largest internet service provider – suffered a massive outage lasting nearly thirty hours from last Friday, leaving its nearly 700,000 customer base with slow or no internet connectivity on their mobile phones or computers – all because some users on their network wanted to see nude pics of celebrities.
According to local media, some users clicked on a link that claimed to contain images from the recent dump of nude photos of high profile female celebrities, such as Jennifer Lawrence and Ariana Grande. However, the link led them to a page telling them they had to download a piece of software to view them – which turned out to be malware.
Spark told the New Zealand Herald that it was a denial of service attack linked to some of its customers downloading malware that caused its network to go down, and has taken steps to remedy the problem.
“The return to a normal browsing experience is due to a combination of, one, us taking a number of steps to mitigate the issue over the past two days, and, two, the pressure on our network, which has been coming from some customer’s devices being used in Denial of Service attacks aimed at overseas networks, subsiding,” a spokesperson told the newspaper.
“Our work has included identifying and neutralising the effect of the small number of customer connections that had been exploited by cyber criminals to send vast amount of traffic through our network to overseas destinations.”
The company did not confirm that it was malware linked to the nude pictures of celebrities, and was unable to guarantee that it will not happen again the future because of the “dynamic” nature of the attack.
